


i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)

by hitlikehammers



Series: Cardiophilia Sequence [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Cardiophilia, Codependency, Emotional Overload, Heartbeat Kink, Human Anatomy, Loss, Love, M/M, Near Death Experience, Poisoning, Pulsepoint Kink, Realization, Romance, Suicidal Ideation, Temporary Character Death, Vulnerability, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:54:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All songs end. All hearts stop.</p><p>But damnit, not <i>John’s</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Follows **[suddenly your heart showed me my way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/411375)** , **[the beat and beating heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/422019/chapters/704161)** , **[your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/446596)** , and **[echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/450331)** , but stands on its own.
> 
> My continued thanks to [](http://speak-me-fair)[](http://speak-me-fair)**speak_me_fair** for the Britpicking and beta-work, for pointing out my contradictions and for sparking new thoughts where I'd thought I'd gone dry.

Sherlock inhales, dry in the night air, thin against his throbbing pulse as he grins, a hunter with his prey; as he puts more of his weight onto the foot holding down the suspect at the chest—the suspect who, while not particularly clever, had proven unfortunately fleet of foot. Once they’d reached Gilspur just outside of Barts, John had taken the left whilst Sherlock veered right—they hadn’t spoken, they didn’t have to anymore; it was implicit, small tells in their body language, reading patterns of preference and behaviour over time, and Sherlock has never known that kind of synchronicity. Can’t help but simultaneously scorn and relish it.

He can’t help but _want_ , in the moment, to find John immediately, to summon the man to his side and kiss him, desperate, to measure the pulse in John’s lips against his tongue; to see if their motions, their rhythms are matched deeper across distance, over time.

He’s still breathless with the Chase and reeling with it, vibrating and light as he sends two texts: one to John, to announce the capture of their quarry, and one to Lestrade with his location. He hears the chime of Lestrade’s mobile behind him and starts, turns: the man is already there, advancing from the main road. Sherlock fights a grin and schools his face against the curl of his lips—it seems Greg is learning to read the signs. Perhaps there’s hope for the Detective Inspector, after all.

“Your counterfeiter,” Sherlock dismisses the criminal with a nod, relieves the man’s torso of the confining press of his instep and sneers at the way he gasps when the Met moves to take the man into custody. 

“Room 314 at the Savoy,” Sherlock rattles off, already striding back toward the main-way, listening for John’s voice, the particular meter of John’s breath as he catches it, as he reins in exertion and breathes free again—a tempo Sherlock knows and times his own lungs to, when he can; takes into himself when he’s able and revels in the familiarity, the way it sparks inside his chest: inexplicable, irrational, objective and yet so real. “You’ll find the evidence you need.”

“Right,” Lestrade replies from just beyond Sherlock’s right shoulder. The light from the street lamps breaks across Sherlock’s pupils and he blinks, narrows his gaze and searches for John—he must have returned here, once he’d known his pursuit was futile, and Sherlock’s suddenly very eager to see him, to take him home and touch him, to rest his head against John’s chest and taste the salt of him, the slick heat of his flesh alive with thrumming blood, pulsing with vigour and life.

“Wait,” Lestrade starts again, and Sherlock smirks at the tone of his voice; “you _ran_ from the Savoy?”

Sherlock ignores the inquiry—irrelevant, but oh, how the Chase had energised him, how it must have danced in John’s chest just as strongly as it throbbed in his own. Sherlock ponders John’s recovery rates, the time they’d been running and the time since the text, and he estimates John’s accelerated pulse to have largely calmed by at least forty beats per minutes since they’d caught their man, a brisk and brilliant _Moderato_ and Sherlock can hear it, can feel it in his marrow as his eyes slip shut for an instant, as something nameless and terrible flutters reckless beneath his ribs.

He steps outside the alleyway to the sound of stumbling footsteps; they don’t catch his attention at first, except then the weight of them, the size and shape betrayed with every echo of that tread bursts forth and Sherlock’s chest clenches, recognising the sound before his mind confirms the source. Joints poised, Sherlock turns, and there he is: expression strained, bent double, feet tangling as his balance evaporates.

There _John_ is, as he looks up at Sherlock with fear, real horror in his gaze and need; as he drops in slow motion before Sherlock’s eyes.

“Lestrade!” Sherlock calls out, the echo of his voice thready, panicked; the timbre and tremble like a violence, a vibrato unchecked. He’s surging forward, on his knees in an instant; bracing John's torso before the rest of him topples to the ground. He registers the a muttered oath in a voice he knows behind him before a torrent of hurried footsteps leads away but that’s the last of it, the last of the world that Sherlock pays any mind because John is in his arms, John is limp and lifeless, his eyes fluttering and the soft list of his breath faint: John is trembling against him, panting, and Sherlock’s heart leaps to his throat, maniacal, terrified, as he runs hands down John’s sides, leans close, narrows his eyes and sees nothing, hears nothing over the rush of blood and John’s laboured gasps. 

“John,” Sherlock chokes, unwilling to accept and unable to believe the evidence of his eyes, his fingertips: the weight of John that he knows in his arms but coupled with such frailty, such a diminished sense of the presence that is his partner, more than his better half: his _whole_.

“Sher...” John starts but loses the name, the latter syllable and anything after; Sherlock latches on to the sound like a lifeline and tries not to lose himself to the sense of foreboding, the way his bones are already bracing for disaster, for the breaking.

John gestures idly, uncontrolled toward his thigh: Sherlock looks, forces himself to tear his focus from John’s face, his chest and look instead toward his limbs. He barely makes out the small tear in John’s jeans, the denim only just ripped, a pinprick drawn down through the fibre by momentum, blessed force and motion giving it away: a needle, a syringe—infusion, injection, at least intradermal, but had the enemy been shrewd, skilled? In so short a time, had they pierced the muscle, the vein, before fleeing, before leaving John broken here in Sherlock’s lap, tucked boneless against Sherlock’s chest?

They were only apart for moments, minutes, the space between and within seven-hundred-and-fifty-three heartbeats; Sherlock had only breathed disparate air, only faced a separate threat for that minuscule, interminable window which means nothing and changes everything, that’s put John on the ground before him, shivering, gasping, hand clutched to his chest in a way that makes Sherlock’s skin crawl, makes his eyes bleed, his veins constrict and bar entrance to the plasma, the adrenaline: that whispers _no_ in the hollow of his chest and promises darkness and endings if John’s hand goes slack, if he slips.

Sherlock finds that he can’t swallow.

“John,” he exhales again, his chest trying to heave and yet incapable, impossible, unbearable. He takes in the shade of John’s skin, accounts for the lighting, the shadows and the street lamps; he checks respiration, weighs the character and the speed, the depth against John’s normal rates before he lays his trembling fingers down the hard line of John’s carotid, the veins distended as John gasps and strains and shakes, and Sherlock can feel the pulse of blood, but only just. It’s faint, and Sherlock’s known the sharp dive of hesitance, the whir of anxiety in his own veins when John’s heart’s pulsed hard, frantic, so unconscionably quick—he’s known that, felt it sour and sicken in his gut and yet this is something else, something vile and nauseating; this is John’s pulse like the barest caress, a valediction, a lament. This is an echo of a life just hanging, just clinging, and it’s slipping, and Sherlock clutches, scratches as John’s skin with his hands but it only gets slower. It only retreats all the more.

Sherlock draws breath in, reluctant, and tries not to dwell on the way John’s pulse is losing cadence, is slowly jangling out a death rattle in the dark. He wants to draw his hand away, knows that he can’t, knows that for all that the slowing, stilling pulse squeezes tight around him, claustrophobic and condemning and so very cold at his ribs—for all that it overruns his mind and storms the gates of his Palace and threatens invasion, defeat; he knows that to feel nothing, to pull away now and wonder is unthinkable, untenable.

He watches John’s eyes widen, watches them glaze and he forces himself to think, to _think_ , but god, god, fuck, he can’t, he can’t.

He has no _choice_.

Sherlock leans and presses his lips to John’s neck; closes his eyes and calls to the fore all of the data, all of the numbers and the charts and the correlations he’s run on John, on that failing heart between them and Sherlock leans his chest against John’s ever so slightly, careful not to impede his struggling breaths but determined, somehow, inexplicably intent upon bringing his own frantic heart as close to John’s as possible, to remind it, to remind _him_ how to manage, how to balance, how to breathe.

Sherlock sorts through the annals, the libraries in his besieged mental fortress dedicated to the way John’s pulse contracts, the character of its every palpitation, its every twinge and give. Sherlock knows it, and can pinpoint the subtle lag in contraction, the too-long pause between systole and diastole, the vacuous void where there’s nothing, where Sherlock counts on there being _something_ : something powerful and riveting and pulsating, something passionate and perfect, strong and steady, warm and sure and close and true.

Sherlock runs through the anomalies like clues, the timing and the rhythm, and it’s hazy, its incomplete and ill-drawn, but the picture begins to coalesce among the noise in his mind, despite the way that everything bleeds at the edges when the evidence before him—John’s body, John’s chest, John’s blundering heart and lazy-drying blood and his fluttering eyes and his breaths like half-hearted gasps, like grasping at straws in the face of the inevitable, and Sherlock cannot think about the inevitable, the improbabilities that are impossibilities, that he cannot process and he cannot accept because he will not survive then; he can’t.

It’s a fog like nothing he’s ever known, a thickness and a din he can’t escape; it’s a numbness in his limbs and a slowness of his neurones, but he pushes through, squints against fear and frustration and soft sheen of tears, because he doesn’t care what happens when you eliminate the impossible. What’s left this time _cannot_ be _true_.

Poison, then; high dosage, immediate effect, but how much reached the vein, how much into flesh, the soft tissue? How long does John have, what monster rages in his body, through his cells—what foreign substance is taking him apart from the molecules, wrenching the nuclei from every atom, ripping John from where he belongs, where he fits and holds and completes another being, another self, another soul in the process of simply living, breathing, beating at Sherlock’s side? 

He wrestles the bile back down his throat and pushes that thought down, heavy in his gut as he focuses, as he straightens and looms over John, frames John’s face with his hands, thumbs at the jaw to count the pulse when it comes, languid and losing, leaving, losing, as John’s eyes close with a finality that stutters in Sherlock’s arteries and steals the breath from his lungs.

“John!” Sherlock snaps, snarls, begs from the bones of him, from the marrow and the muscle fibres sparking wild in his chest. “Look at me,” and John tries to, he can tell, but those eyes are elsewhere, that mind is slipping in the sand but those lips are moving with the last of it, stumbling over the barest breaths, little tremors of the chest beneath him that Sherlock can barely feel through the layers of their clothing, the sob of space between. 

“Don’t speak,” Sherlock whispers, rasps; he feels suspended, at the whims of the fleeing animation that lives inside the man beneath him, the light of him that’s flickering for all that Sherlock’s trying, desperate, to block it from the breeze for just a minute, just one second more. 

“Just breathe,” Sherlock urges, watches John with the utmost intent, eyes stretched wide and sore, cool: damp, and so are his lashes, the corners of his eyes—the sting is tangible, and it sinks below the skin to drench the whole of him when John’s chest starts to inflate but sinks on itself, a puncture, a hole, and John is all but diminished, all but drowned before his eyes.

“Can’t,” John rasps, and the way his chest expands and then collapses is wrenching, utterly grotesque, and Sherlock twists with it, is wrung between the flesh and the bones as John’s eyes begin to flutter, as his fingers scratch, seek for something, flail for purchase until Sherlock grasps John’s hand, until he measures John’s radial pulse and steels John’s frenzied, mindless touch. He times, takes note of the dichotomy between the wrist and the neck, as he cradles the jugular now with infinite care below the crook of the distal phalanges, hesitant, horrified, willing himself to _focus_ and feel, to observe and osmose and deduce.

“But you _must_ ,” Sherlock hisses, his eyes wide, pupils dilated to take in anything that could help, every detail that might veer the course but he is betrayed, disappointed: he comes up lacking, and all he can see is John’s clavicle heaving, the terror in John’s expression as he struggles for breath, 

“Do you understand?” Sherlock demands, shouts and means to command but he’s tumbling, in freefall: his breath is sparse and timid and his heart is strung, lanced and unravelling in every syllable he spends. “Do not stop _breathing_ , John,” Sherlock brings John’s hand thoughtlessly, instinctively to his own chest, traps the trembling appendage tight against his sternum and leans forward into John’s narrowing line of sight, continues to take in what information he can, what tells might save them both from falling as he murmurs, speaks for the sake of it, for the hum of it, for the implication, the perverse idea that words could mean anything, anymore.

“Watch, yes, breathe with me,” Sherlock sucks in air and holds it, unsure; he knows the arterial pressure of John’s pulse in a hundred given scenarios, can name it to the millimetre of mercury but his fingers can’t grasp, can only process _life_ , and _arrhythmia_ , and _failing_ , and _dear god **no**_ and so he lowers his head and drops his lips to the beat, feels ill to think of before, of all the times before; of the first time and the second time and the hundred-and-twenty-seventh time and by all that is holy and hellish in the cosmos, let this not be the _last_ time, let this not be all that’s left.

“Help is coming, John,” Sherlock nearly moans as John continues to pant and choke and wheeze; he drags the sigh of John’s name out wet against his neck before he draws up again and runs his thumbs along the soft lines of John’s cheekbones, down the proud jut of his jaw as John starts to slip, to still, as Sherlock’s own heart pauses, disbelieving: suspended in his chest before it plummets, cut from its strings and runs, trips, _runs_.

Where is their _help_?

“I,” Sherlock blinks hard, sees flashes behind his eyelids, the route of his own doomed blood flow traced black below the skin, and he doesn’t know what else he can do, he doesn’t know how else he can seek, look, observe. He is helpless, and he cannot be helpless, not for John, not _with_ John and it is folly, maybe, but the space between certainty and possibility is a yawning gap and Sherlock will leap, he will leap for John Watson and the heart in him and the heart he _is_ , by god, and he will fall and die upon impact if he must, if it would make a difference; if it could help.

“Forgive me, John,” he whispers, catches a dampness he doesn’t register on his lip when he speaks it, when he blocks out the way John’s eyes loll, unattached in their sockets and his chest heaves, contained and ready to crack at the bones when Sherlock rests against it, weighs upon it, puts his ear to the centre and exhales long: deduces.

Prays, fuck; he _prays_.

The tachypnea is obvious, was obvious from the start; he pushes it aside, lets it mull in the ether, in the background—ready to latch on when the clues come together, to confirm or deny what Sherlock finds, what he _must find_. He listens for the signal, the closure of the tricuspid and the mitral valves, braces for the papillary contraction and the tensing of the chordae tendineae, those tender-fragile heart strings: he listens and he yearns to reach for them, to play them like his violin but with infinite care, with a feeling he’s never given the Music, that he never knew he could amass and hold in his chest for the sheer laws of physics—there’s not enough room, and there’s wetness on his face and he’s gasping, he’s shaking, he’s clenching bruises into John’s paling skin and gravity is too generous, too cruel: he’s falling, and it’s coming, but it’s not soon enough—he doesn’t want to see this, doesn’t want to be there when it’s over, on collision, when it’s gone.

He listens, and the first sound, that first beat is just a murmur: muted, waning, and it’s all too slow; was too slow beneath his fingers and his lips before. It’s the slow march of leaving, it’s a mournful farewell in percussive shivers peppered wild, riotous and toxic with moments of speed, racing: there are episodes of tachycardic fervour that twist in Sherlock’s chest as they fling, frantic and uncoordinated rapid and reeling, manic as the muscle hits and rebounds around John’s ribcage, off his lungs before it ceases, and Sherlock crumbles, dies by fractions until the sound picks back up and touches, dances at the edges of his skin but so frail, so soft, devoid of all the magnitude and feeling Sherlock knows in John’s heart, that Sherlock’s tasted and seen and touched. 

The sounds are muddled, hazy, and more than just from Sherlock’s own distraction, his own terror and bounding pulse—multiform arrhythmia, he identifies it, and Sherlock tries to focus, imagines the lines of the beats, the conduction and the shock on a screen, the etch of an electrocardiogram belying the intimacies, the vengeful cackles of stealing and losing and taking and wrenching and killing more than one man in the stopping of a pulse.

He imagines the P wave, runs potentialities, tries to gauge, to infer the electrical conduction of every slogging beat by way of its intensity, its speed, the variability between the sounds that Sherlock holds so paramount, so essential to his own self. He listens, swallows hard when his mental image erodes that first modest peak in the schematic of a regular rhythm, of John’s heart at rest, at ease, with _life_ and Sherlock’s cheek pressed against it, hot and loud and everything, _everything_. Now, though, the space, the silence, the rush of useless air and nothing, nothing: it’s too long, that high summit stretched wide, the complex prolonged, the interval lingering interminable, unbearable, it’s—God, let him be wrong: the pulses, the voltage is failing, leaving, contraction lagging, no, no, _no_.

“You’ll be fine, John,” he grinds out; John doesn’t hear him, he’s sure of that—John’s wavering on the threshold of Hades, mingling with Thanatos himself, and Sherlock’s coming, he’s coming, he’ll follow, he’s sure, but he can’t, not yet, he has to _try._

“It’ll all be fine.” Sherlock tells the beat, tries to guide it into a cadence that’s sustainable, that can last, but it’s for naught; if anything, the words are trampled by more quiet, more emptiness startled sharp by bouts of too much chaos—or perhaps too little: too few contractions as the escape rhythm skips, seizes _Gravé_ and flirts with _Lento_ , _Largo_ , shakes Sherlock to the core when it dares to dip _Larghissimo_ ; there’s too little motion, not enough fervour in John's cardiac muscles as they move to palpitate, to fibrillate—to still and cease forevermore. 

And Sherlock: he has idly wondered, before, about the etymology, the history and veracity of the word _heartbreak_ —predating the biblical, before Middle and Old English, cognates with the German, the Dutch, the Gothic and Old Norse. Anatomically, it’s misleading, utterly imprecise: the heart does not fracture like a bone, it doesn’t shatter like fine china or stained glass, it doesn’t gather in pieces or trickle, it doesn’t catch the light in fragments and facets; it doesn’t tear out the seam at the septum and leave the halves to writhe and bleed. It’s not the heart that feels pain, not unless blunt force trauma or physical infirmity is ruled the cause. It’s the anterior cingulate cortex, in all likelihood, that manifests the phenomenon, that triggers the sensation of pain: it’s overstimulation of the vagus nerve, it’s the superior organ at the head, held highest, tricking that changeable pump in the chest into fearing its untimely end had come. Nothing more. 

Except that was before John Watson. 

And in many ways, before John Watson—without John Watson—Sherlock was a goddamned fool. 

There is nothing to herald the fall itself, the actual pause of a protracted end; a line is simply drawn in the space of a blink where life was, before death filled the void and Sherlock is violently ill when the chest he’s pressed against stops lifting, when the heart he’s aching for stops moving, turns leaden for what doesn’t feed it, for what doesn’t slide warm through its ventricles, for what doesn’t charge hard through its veins. 

“John,” Sherlock voices, because he doesn’t remember language or sound, but something deeper than memory knows _John_. His own heart is vibrating, wrenching, racing and contorting at odd angles, vicious intervals, galloping at a hateful, lethal pace until he grows dizzy, until his chest aches, until he’s shivering with the uncoordinated force of it beneath his ribs and he cannot think, he cannot breathe, he cannot accept this reality, this stillness, this cold and leaden din and fuck, fuck, his heart’s flayed at the surface, it’s ripping itself to shreds because it knows, it knows what his mind won’t affirm, it understands the world as battered and bereft, as useless and robbed of all meaning. It understands that the Chase will never satisfy and the Notes will never soar, that all which once fulfilled him will taste of ash and roil in his gut, that his life as it was ceased to be, ceased to dwell when he dared to leave his chest unprotected, when he failed to rebuke the hand that held the fragile muscle, grey with disdain and misuse, pink with promise; when he let that hand caress and care and give life until all was crimson, deepest violet-red with need and feeling, sentiment, _sentiment_ and now it’s blanching, bleaching, bleeding, cracking, calling, crying, deadened, dying, desperate— 

“John?” Sherlock gasps, because the word comes out from the sinoatrial node itself, a last effort, a final sigh before the end, choked, and it’s not just his mind, it’s not neural stimulation that clenches in his chest. It’s the ribs collapsing and snapping and stabbing at him sharp, puncturing lungs and stealing his breath; it’s the pericardium swelling and pressing and promising relief, promising relentless dark when the searing ends, when the hottest brand he’s ever felt stops lodging between his atria, stoked to blazing as they breathe funerary rites at his blood; it’s the striation of the muscle itself where it clamps and constricts, braiding together and hanging like a noose. 

“John,” Sherlock’s lips move but he doesn’t want to breathe, doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to be or do or acknowledge this, the still, the stifling; the greying, the gone. 

“No, no, John,” he chokes, gasps, and his throat burns and his eyes blur and his mind reels, dizzy, lost: the data merges, incomprehensible, the walls come crashing down, and he’s standing, ready for electrocution or impalement or to be caught beneath the falling of the weight and the world and himself, dismantled bit by bit. Sherlock is, he is— 

Broken. He comprehends it, now, as the darkness gathers and his ribs give way under the pressure, the pointless weight of being, and it’s shock and fear and loss and the kind of devastation that kills without a bullet or a blade, that takes only what matter and leaves enough to watch the fray and Sherlock cannot bear it, cannot hold it, cannot withstand or endure. Broken. Oh, yes. 

He understands entirely. 

He’s more than a moment too slow—a moment that drives an unrelenting icicle of terror down his spine as he starts chest compressions, desperate, aching as his heart convulses before striking a painful, staccato thrum beneath his sternum, regimented and precise, the hiss-and-drag of metal and petrol, of feeling and the world in the balance. There’s a machine in his chest that remembers its purpose, that kept him breathing through the overdoses and the worst of his self-loathing, the peak of his misanthropic demise but as he measures his rhythm, the depth of each push to the centimetre, the millimetre, he thinks this may be the last of it, the end of it: the point of no return. 

Even the machine can withstand only so much, for all the wear upon it, for the way it was left to disrepair in light of something better, something heady made of heat and a wet-wanting thump, so human, so heavy: so vital. 

The machine is nothing, in comparison. Not now that Sherlock has known the real rhythm, the blessed beat. 

“No, no,” Sherlock repeats it, a mantra, a penance, his purgatory with every press, every compression as he counts in his mind the beats he’s forcing, faking; the moments where John’s heart depends on him, where he _is_ John’s heart except that John was his, is his, and John is still and dormant, John is bleeding from Sherlock more vividly, more painfully than lifeblood, the last tendrils of his humanity. John is his heart and without him, how is Sherlock meant to stand, how can Sherlock be anything for anyone, for another, for John in the now when he needs it, when he must? 

“Please,” Sherlock exhales, shuddering, his lifelines digging into John’s stiffening flesh for as hard as he’s pushing, pressing, insisting against the unnatural order of things, the unspeakable mistake that the cosmos has made in taking John, in extinguishing that singular light. 

“John, please, I,” and he’s never wanted anything, he’s never felt anguish or sorrow or pressure squeezing his chest like this; he’s never needed enough to beg with everything he is, everything he knows—he’s been willing to sell his soul for less, and his heart’s already lost, but he thinks he’d sacrifice his mind at the altar of the universe if it meant John’s breath, if it meant John’s heart; if it took Sherlock’s brilliance and his own pulse in the process, he thinks he’d give it, and that is wrong and terrifying and absolutely true. 

“Please, John, _breathe_.” 

As he fits his lips to John’s and breathes, he cannot help himself but to cry into the exhale, cannot help the way his mouth is salty, damp, and wets John’s chin as he fills John’s lungs, as he lifts John’s pallid, pulseless heart all the closer, so fucking far; as he abandons his selfhood and prays for a miracle, Sherlock knows with perfect clarity that this is the one thing that the mechanism he’d built to keep him solitary, _safe_ , can’t survive, won’t endure. The cogs are moved by blood’s momentum, now; the valves of mortal muscle set the pace, more flesh than iron, but one rusts, and both decay, and he is cast adrift, he is diminished, he is desiccated and condemned, and he, he— 

“You have to, you can’t be,” Sherlock mumbles, babbles, flaps his tongue for the sake of the motion, for the sake of drowning out despair for the moment, because the despair will stop him, will freeze him, will allow a gap for the rationality, for the logic to pervade and he cannot listen, he cannot give up yet. “Please.” 

His hands are numb, and all he wants is to slip his palm through John’s skin, between John’s ribs and hold that stillborn, sinking heart and give it all the blood and all the air, to wash it in tears and lukewarm intentions, to sucks its fear and take the poison into a lesser body, a sullied soul; to press lips against the ventricles and trace the aorta with his tongue and curl the shape of his lips to the circumference of the superior vena cava, to suck at the brachiocephalic artery until that double-fisted muscle knows how essential it is, how much it matters, how much it is needed and how frantically, irreparably, unrepentantly and irrevocably it is loved. He wants to urge it with the sheer force of his own pulse, his own emotion, his devotion and his dying-deathless need for the man who’s lying cold beneath him, who’s taking Sherlock with him for every moment that his heart only moves because Sherlock presses, because Sherlock pumps, and Sherlock is inadequate, Sherlock cannot move mountains, Sherlock cannot wake the dead and he will never be enough to keep that heart here, he will never be enough and he is slipping, every second, to the place where John’s pulse fled. 

His hands are numb, but he cannot stop. 

He doesn’t hear the approach of the medics, doesn’t realise that the arms that grasp him, that pull him away belong to Lestrade; he doesn’t connect the scream, the cry, the soul-rending wail that tears through the air to his own voice until his mouth goes dry and his throat is raw with it, with the visceral break from John, with watching John as he’s taken away, still and empty, a vessel tinged with cyanosis and impeding decay, too cool already, and no, Christ, no— 

“Potassium chloride,” his mind provides, his vocal cords conspire, his lips part to provide: he is automatic, now, he doesn’t think to say or do anything but his body knows better, or worse: he’s stumbling, cannot find balance—his gravity wrenched away. The last whir of his hard drive; the mosaic of fate writ in the ruins of his Palace—they piece together the points of consequence and sift away the detritus and force it out between the haphazard twitchings of his wasted-wanting heart: desperate. An answer. A culprit. A knife to the chest. 

Too late. 

“Potassium,” he gasps, and his vision isn’t merely blurred, it’s darkening, shadowed and warped; his cheeks aren’t simply damp but drenched, his eyes streaming and his breathing choked with the inhale of his own tears, so ready and vibrant and bitter, the first he’s cried with any meaning, any purpose or feeling in years and they are endless, they’re acidic and Sherlock can’t remember the atomic mass of the element, or the electron configuration, can’t remember the treatment for hyperkalemia, can’t recall the sound of John’s breath or the pace of his heart in the refractory period, with John’s pulse against Sherlock’s chest and his fingers, racing in this ears and through his skin. He can’t recall if John’s heart was left still too long to return, to recover; he can’t recall the world without John Watson and the fact that his being, his essence, his person and self is too much, too deep and full and all-encompassing to be revived by weak hands and atropine and fuck, fuck— 

“Oh god,” Sherlock stumbles, vomits on the pavement before his colour vision bleeds out and what remains of his acuity fractures to follow the rest of him; before all he sees is black, and all he knows is nothing. 

Nothing. 


	2. Part II

In the solitude, the privacy of his mind, he can almost admit it. Not in words, not specifically; not without caveats and implications and subtle, deniable assents to the individual components of the confessions, the admissions. But he can acknowledge it, however partially, however briefly: however hollow in his chest.

Sherlock Holmes fears silence.

There had never been silence, before. There had been quiet; times when his mind was violent and ruthless and hateful when it wished for him to suffer the void, but there was always something. His senses would rebel; there was always a buzz, a hum, sometimes a roar or a wail—there were always thoughts, always images and intimations and the call of a crime or a case or a quest or a high. Always, he could hear it, could perceive the vibration of it, maddening and ever-present, ceaseless even as it vacillated, his only companion, the only thing he’d ever need.

All had been well.

But then there had been a soldier, a doctor, a fighter and a healer and a mind that didn’t undulate wildly but took the world as it stood and built from the ground up, patient and competent and careful and sure; then there had been the cardiac muscle that pumped steady and full, committed to the moment after watching the void consume too much life, curtail too many songs and halt them before the coda was penned. Then there had been jam and antiseptics and steady hands and a scar traced, dug into tough skin; skin that was too soft to the touch, too desirable, too precious.

But then—but _then_ , there was a heart: miraculous, impossible—that was strong enough, large enough, brave enough to beat for two, that could read the cues before they came and that leaped without a failsafe, a fallback, a floor; that taught him without his knowledge, outside his of awareness. There was a heart that quietly, patiently, _damnably_ recalibrated his metronome and repositioned his centre of gravity and moulded the parts of himself be believed to be solid, unshakeable—that altered the smallest parts of him until without even realising, he’d been made new: the chords of him completed and a harmony coaxed forth, triumphant, keening and fledgling but filled with such promise, a voice that sang in the blood of him, a pulse that resonated, persistent, until his own heart surged in time.

And dear god, it was _symphonic_. It was brilliant and blinding and it soared, it seared around his veins—not just in them but _through_ them, buoying them and raising them high, lifting them and allowing them to reach summits, to trace peaks he’d never known; speeding along the lilting tendrils, the hints of thoughts and observations, the first inklings of deduction and making them glide, making them thrill with new vigour, new _life_. The layers of being, of motive and meaning and progression and cause became simultaneously manifest: not teased back in succession but played out at once with a joyous abandon he’d never thought to look for, a playful sort of sheen to the Work that changed everything, that threw light at different angles and painted the world in new shades, lent tint and nuance to every speck and every clue, the most mundane of all minutiae would glitter, so long as it was cast in the proper luminance, so long as _John_ brought forth the sun.

 _His_ John.

It was a revelation, really, loath as he is to admit it, deep as it shivers in him, crying in the cold. Before, Sherlock had never dreamt of pairing notes like that, of fusing keys and blending shades. He’d never thought of countering his double sharps with such subtle, complex naturals—naturals, but never flats, never boring, always fascinating and foolish, fresh and fevered and full, and it proved genius, proved wrenching and wild in a soul he’d never believed in until it burst to life and sang, until something in him shuddered warm and wanting from the brain to the bones of him, until no other word—not rational term—could fit the extent of it, the expanse: the way it felt and clung and moved.

He shudders, but it’s nothing: everything now is still.

He doesn’t remember, for certain, when the buzzing started to coalesce, when the random pitches harmonised into a whole. He can’t recall when the whir grew fraught with whispers, with murmurs and the sound of boiling water, of pouring tea, of footsteps racing and the loss of a limp, that particular pattern of steps. He doesn’t remember when the hum that was manic became pleasant and smooth, a bullet train rather than a melee, the processes streamlined and structured anew, and Sherlock had known that he was brilliant, known he was efficient and incomprehensibly clever and yet then there were crescendos and supernovae, discoveries and details that made the Chase seem new again, made the quiet murmurs of _dull_ and _common_ and _repetition, repetition, **repetition**_ fade in the breeze because there was a weight at his side, in his hand: there was a presence—unlooked for and yet, somehow perfectly suited, carved to fit the holes Sherlock had never noticed, hadn’t seen—that shifted the balance moment by moment, breath by breath.

And then the beat. Oh Christ, the _beat_.

Sherlock knows, he knew from the very beginning that it was dangerous, that pulse—enticing, potentially lethal: he knew that it was everything, the very best, the truest, darkest, most desperate and concealed parts of the man who held it, against whose force it strained. Sherlock knew that if he let himself dwell upon it that he’d learn to know it, to question it and seek answers, to centre curiosity around its ebb and flow and then he’d crave it, and his cravings had never been benign—he’d _need_ it, soon enough But in his mind he’d argued: it was easier to need the pulse than to need the man.

Than to _admit_ that he needed the man.

But then there had been more. There’d been longing, alongside addiction. There’d been affection, alongside fascination. There’d been feeling, sentiment, the flutter of warmth that accompanied his intellectual occupation. There’d been his own hated-heart lit up, new and vibrant, brought to stinging surging swelling life, a life he’d never prepared for, never thought upon, never wondered how to grasp and control and abide. 

He was lost almost immediately, stumbling, flailing, his eyes blurred with the windfall, his observations skewed, his mind confused and it was horrifying, maddening: he’d clawed for release to no avail, had clung to the spinning feeling in him, a hymn and a dirge because it was beautiful, because something deeper than cognition knew what he couldn’t, what his mind had been trained to ignore.

He’d been falling, he realises now, from the very start.

But then: a hand, a wrist, a splay of fingertips like feathers, like a sigh—then a stretch of skin to meet his eyes, to slide against the bridge of his nose, warm and throbbing; then lips and a tongue and then more: the taste of sweat and flesh, of heat and need, the scent of arousal and the timing, the arc, the journey from pounding to thrumming to pulsing to trilling, to singing and staying in Sherlock’s mind and his chest, to lilting along the cell walls of every piece of him, every component of his being like a swan song and a climax and a phoenix at rebirth, torn apart and set afire and then blinking, blinded, brought forth once more. It was failing to recognise himself from day to day inside the mirror, and yet, knowing the reflection in ways he never could before, seeing truth in the glass and the fog of his breath on the surface, in the flush of his skin and the daring pulse between his collarbones, visible when he thought too hard on it, when he dwelled on the whys he couldn’t handle instead of the weight he’d come to treasure: crushing even as it held him close. It was cursing his mind, his _mind_ for the first time, the only time, unforgivable, because it was ill-equipped for all its space, its dexterity and skill: it is not sufficient to process and cherish and hold all of John, the whole of him, because John is greater, John exceeds it,:John exceeds all that Sherlock can imagine and recall and that is impossible and unthinkable and yet, and _yet_ —

John exceeded. John _was_.

His cheeks are wet, Sherlock realises, and his chest seems heavy, leaden. By rights, it should hurt to breathe. By all logic, he should be able to feel the treasonous pump of his own heart, tangible for all the pressure built around it, a wall reforming itself but futile, transparent, all air and blood and already breached. He can hear it.

But there is no feeling.

Which simply affirms, merely serves to underscore the fact that he could feel, did feel, for all his denial and disdain: he had _felt_ , and deeply, transformatively even, maybe, because the lack of it, the loss of it—the numbness is unconscionable, unbearable, 

Again, words are inadequate, they do not fit, they’ve not been etched, never rolled off a tongue with care and passion and _sentiment_ , never skipped, strong but soft and drenched with colour off a mouth whose taste Sherlock can’t quite recall anymore, can’t speak to even by comparison, can’t recapture adequately in his mind as _Camellia sinensis_ and toothpaste, as curry and coriander and butterscotch, as sweetness and spice and freshness and life and all the little cravings that Sherlock never paid any mind to; that once satisfied, once overwhelmed and overflowed nearly overcame the others, the darker yearnings—could have satiated enough to grant submission, to calm the worst of his demons, the beasts.

He can’t.

Because there is no rhythm. There is no cadence. There is noise, and it is frantic, it is rising to a fever pitch, unforgiving and violent and ready to scream until the glass cracks through, until he fractures except he _cannot_ , he is _broken_ , and to shatter any more would be redundant, would be blood in shrivelled veins, a blow when there’s no pressure to ferry it to its target, no momentum to drive the last bullet clean through the core. 

There is noise, but it means nothing. It does not echo. It cannot touch.

There is silence.

The ceiling is so very far away—the thought filters through the open space inside his skull, and he knows that the floor at his back isn’t moving, but everything seems untethered, leaving, fleeing, and he’s always falling, never firm. He plays with the crease, the fold of his morocco case, always hidden under the panels in his drawers, concealed by his sock index, obvious, never found. The leather is smooth, he knows that, but it’s no more than air, no more than fleeting contact: it means nothing, makes no impact, less than a vacuum and sullied, dead.

Seven percent. His perfect solution.

There are no solutions for _this_.

He remembers the overdose, remembers the burn in his veins and the way that he could feel his heartbeat in his cuticles, his kneecaps, the roots of his teeth: rattling and shivering in every strand of hair. He recalls the process of it: he’d needed to know the upper extreme, the limit—microgram by microgram until he was certain, until he knew what his body could withstand, its _ne plus ultra_ in every sense. Bit by porous, needless-knowing bit.

Until breaking.

And oh, how it had burned. Fire and frenetic energy in his cells as they collapsed, as his neural pathways seared until simply brushing against his skull would have branded the coils, would have smote into the gyri and sulci like fingerprints, ouroboros on the skin. He remembers the convulsions of the one atrium before the other, vicious, at war: the heat, like John’s, a paltry imitation, a sorry excuse for a fix, but Sherlock wonders if maybe, just maybe he can fool himself. He wonders if maybe he can close his eyes and imagine, and maybe just the feeling will take him back only hours, only moments and he can pretend that there is rhythm again, superimpose some reason upon the world once more, a cure for the dullness and the way everything bleeds, all the edges washed away: for the way that observation now seems heavy, unwelcome—leaden, lacklustre, opaque. 

He had _felt_ then, in those moments, and he’d thought it was enough.

Except now he knows, now he _knows_ and it isn’t. Now he knows new limits, quantities he never thought to measure, boundaries he never cared to push until they broke of their own accord, overfull, overwhelmed and throbbing, thrumming with a life he’d deemed tedious, and he’d been wrong.

He’d been wrong, fuck, he’d been _wrong_ ; but not to hate it, not to keep it at arm’s length. It deserved his caution, his disdain: it was vile and hateful and it burned brighter and harder and hotter, the hearts of stars and the fabric of time in a fist clenched hard at the centre, shaking, and if he squeezes his eyes shut tight enough, hard enough he can remember it, he can envision the flutter, the feeling of wild and limitless abandon, unrestrained potential and the free-fall that would follow, the bottomless, endless, perfect abomination of feeling, wrapped in surrender, encased in terror and weightlessness, simultaneous focus and infinity, and Sherlock, he, it, just—

He misses it. Jesus, he misses it. 

A sob catches in his throat; he hears it, and it should sting, it should burn soundless in his ragged throat, but it doesn’t. The words are inadequate, but he knows the colloquialism, he can’t avoid the echoes of it in his mind, in the empty space where it used to sing against the ventricular walls, sparking underneath the endocardium: the innermost intimate chambers of the one palace he’d never peered inside before, one that was dark and unknown until someone braved it, someone cracked it open at the rusting hinges and gave light to the dusk.

Sherlock shivers at the memory, the way he shrank back, a coward. He was right to, he was _right_ , but he wishes in the moment, now, that he’d been brave, that he’d met John sooner, more fully, that he’d given everything and let John’s courage come to him as everything else of John, of _them_ had been held close—silent, steady, certain and horrifically undervalued for all that it was, all that it possessed and meant. He wishes he’d had faith and given John the cosmos that spun where his heart used to be, because Sherlock knows what this is called. 

He knows, even if the word doesn’t fit, he can’t contain the depths, the lengths, the timbre and majesty and the tempo and the trill: the rhythm and the conscious thump, in pairs but then staggering, striving toward nearness and perfect symmetry: quadruplets drawn together every time that Sherlock pressed a hand and felt things that human skin was born too worn to touch. He knows the term, even if it can never hope to convey the sensation that overtook him every time he dropped his lips to John’s skin and imagined the barriers disintegrating, laved off and coating his tastebuds, immaculate, until Sherlock could savour blood, until he could time that treacherous, sumptuous, scared and sacred thump against his teeth; every time his mind affirmed what his mouth couldn’t say—and oh, what he’d give now to _say_ it, all of it everything. What he wouldn’t give to affirm with every part of him that there is nothing sweeter in the world than the sound of that beat, nothing else that has ever grounded him or made him feel real, made him know he was safe, made him believe in better angels and missing pieces and a benevolent universe if only in passing, if only for the moments where John’s blood was his cantata, his siren song, his periodic table and his vision and his veins.

 _Love_.

It is true, and it is _everything_ but empty, yet he fears it above all things.

And it is alive. It is alive, and it’s bleeding, and it’s a torture more cruel than this world is meant to know because it should have left, it should be gone, it should have died with the heart it belonged inside, the heart that love learned to sing for, that it held to: the heart that should have stopped in twos and yet the stubborn half of it still in his chest is clanging, subvocal—a noise that doesn’t break the still, doesn’t stave off the silence but lends it a new fathomlessness, a new depth because the only heart that matters stopped still beneath his ear, the only heart that matters stole his breath and killed him cold, and all he can really make sense of is the senseless, all he can process is what he cannot accept and will not survive, not for long, and that is John, gone; John, gone.

John. Gone.

Forever.

He doesn’t remember, isn’t sure he had to think about lining the point of the needle to the push of a vein. It’s for the best.

The heat; he wonders if he’ll feel it. The heart, he wonders if it’ll surrender, give in.

His hand is trembling; his pulse limping, and he needs. He _needs_.

“Jesus.” Sherlock never heard the footfalls on the steps, nor the creak of the door; the word, though, the voice makes his fingers relax and leaves the syringe to clatter to the floor.

There are hands at his elbows, sliding up to hook at the axillae; he is unmoored, unhinged, and gravity is all the more hateful, all the more giddy to see it—Sherlock slumps, boneless, but there’s strength behind him, around him, pulling, keeping him afloat in the ocean of this endless, sneering, hushed-howling grief.

He doesn’t want to be saved.

“Up,” the voice commands, and he recognises it: strong jaw, silver hair.

“Come on,” Lestrade groans as he balances Sherlock, swears as Sherlock stumbles, unable to orient himself, his frame: cast out from all orbits and the universal laws—still and staggering. 

“Careful.” Lestrade’s voice is close, the breath of him should be warm: it isn’t.

Vertigo hits him, unforgiving; it’s not dizziness so much as blackness, so much as an intensification of the numbness that his brain knows isn’t right. Lestrade turns him around and studies him, takes in the flat. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, “look at you.” If Greg sees the drugs on the floor, he says nothing.

“Right,” Lestrade sighs, and Sherlock feels the weight of being and losing and an over-heavy heart bear down, clench teeth around his frame, dragging him low but Lestrade seems to see it, seems to anticipate the assault and holds him steady, lets him slump at the pivot points while his skeleton stays upright. 

“Pull yourself together,” Greg tells him, orders—just a tad gruff. “We’re going to Barts.”

Sherlock, had he not been used up, bled dry: he may have questioned that. May have tried to process its unreason and deduce the purpose of the words. As it stands, he merely blinks, tries hard to swallow, longs for the hit scattered, lost like him on the floor.

“ _Now_ , Sherlock,” Lestrade urges, pulling Sherlock’s coat around him, threading his limp arms through the sleeves one by one and herding him, slowly, ankle-over-foot and uncoordinated, falling into the walls ever down, down, down until they reach the landing, the threshold.

Sherlock fears the outside, suddenly; fears whatever’s coming. He can’t make sense of why he needs to go to Barts, why he needs to leave or be or do; he doesn’t know what good he’ll serve when he’s empty and it’s quiet, so quiet, and he wants and he hates and he _hurts_ so much that he can’t know it, can’t give it words or stay conscious with the ache because John’s gone, John’s _gone_ and the world can’t possibly matter in light of that.

Sherlock doesn’t _want_ to go to Bart’s to see his heart splayed out in the morgue.

But when the door slams behind them—as he staggers, half-dragged into Lestrade’s patrol car—he thinks, for a moment, that he can almost feel reverberations, like a stirring, like a whisper, like a caress inside his chest.

 _Please_.

The salt-tracks on his cheeks is suddenly thick and stiff and cold, and his eyes sting against the air; he can feel, _feel_ the trail of one more stray tear dip, let go from the precipice of his cheekbone and his breath hitches, desperate, acid in his chest and he’s too wasted now to help it, too weak to quash it.

Sherlock _hopes_.


	3. Part III

Sherlock stares, cannot move—at least not in the grosser sense of motion, the sense that matters: he’s trembling with a fineness, a finitude that makes him feel all of his years, all of his missteps, every wrong turn and retracted oath and every bruise to the bones in his rib cage that left the fibres weakened, straining the costal cartilage; that left him painfully vulnerable to the last lethal blow of that man, the bright burning light that conducts illumination and symphonies and paradoxes and the best and worst of all things, of waking and dreaming and breathless rage and fear and the sweet-searing ache of feeling in his tendons, in his veins.

He is broken, laid bare.

His shoes, no, not his shoes—the very soles of his feet are leaden, dead weight, and his lungs resist expansion, constricted, condemned as he stares at, stares through the doorway toward the drawn curtains beyond; foreboding—as he stares and sees nothing, hears nothing save the static, nothing but a fuzzyfranticfaltering haze that sounds like fog looks, like the ocean tastes and it is pitiful, unbearable, unending. It is hateful, that thickness, that wretched buzzing void, and he almost turns, he almost runs from it, almost lets the tears fall and it tastes like tears, too, the static—all saltwater and weakness and agony, so perhaps it’s fitting, perhaps he’s meant to do this and the fact that he doesn’t is the aberration, the anomaly. Perhaps he was always meant to run, to leave this, to shore up the faults in his armour and return to war with the world outside and the heart at his centre, to fight and win, goddamnit: perhaps that’s where he goes wrong, where he went wrong in the first place, where he let himself in for harmonies that only hurt; for the sorts of beats that bludgeon, too, that bolster and bruise and it’s all wrong, it’s all _wrong_ —

He can’t run. He can’t run from everything, he can’t fight the pull of gravity.

Not even Sherlock Holmes is that strong.

His muscles move mountains, in that moment, completely outside of his conscious control–he walks forward, crosses an irreversible threshold, a point of no return that he’s long since left behind except it has returned, it is before him again: a choice he’s made and cannot unmake, yet he is called upon to remake it and it’s only repetition, tedious, except it is sickness and violence and churning in the pit of his stomach, the hollow of his chest and he cannot deny it, he cannot chose anew for as much as he wants to, he won’t. Because a man can want in dichotomies, can desire at cross-purposes, can need mutually exclusive entities and he will tear himself in two because of it, he knows; a novel addiction, a beautiful drug and a score that sets his soul ablaze for good and ill all at once.

He starts, shivers running down his spine, through his hips, along his thighs: there is a sudden rush of sensation, an unmitigated avalanche of stimulation. There is the sallow lighting from above as it illuminates tired, pale, fragile skin; there is the impersonal whine of machinery for every moment John’s heart pauses, natural, deafening—John’s _heart_ and Sherlock shudders, feels a fault-line form at the very core of him, feels the breaking— _impossible, more breaking_ —and the pieces that are lost inside the crack. He is absolutely uncannily adrift, he is shaking from head to foot, he is lost inside the expansion of John’s chest with every breath, with the consistent reading of his blood oxygen levels, and his eyes stray to the EKG, the pulse rate, traitorous, and—

He can’t. He can’t look. He can’t know it. He wants to, he wants _it_ , but he cannot.

Because it was gone. He’d envisioned it, just as it stands: a control, a steady neutral to gauge a fall against. He’d watched in his mind as he’d listened, as he’s pressed his own hand and his own ear and his own heart against John’s; as he’d broken and blistered and lost and he _can’t_ , not again, he—

“Caught him, then?”

The lingering static crescendoes, and Sherlock has to fight off a flinch as the noise peaks and then dissipates, sudden—poised on a ledge.

“The forger,” John—John’s voice, Sherlock knows it: exhausted, but with an underlying joy, a pleasure in simply making the sounds, in merely moving his mouth and utilising his vocal cords and creating something wholly new from just the air inside his lungs, of his own accord, his own volition: and there is a rhythm, a cadence that accompanies it, and perhaps Sherlock hears it in the background: the sharp beep of the monitor something he recognises intrinsically, but he will not acknowledge it, he will not allow it to infiltrate his mind or worse, give hope to his withered heart, not before he can know, not before he can confirm that it is John in front of him, not before he knows it’s more than his mind grappling at spectres, more than need and despair and a grief deeper, more overbearing than he can build immunity to, something even he is overcome by, overtaken, laid to waste—John _speaks_.

“You caught him?”

As it happens, it takes most of Sherlock’s mental faculties to tune it out, to override that high-pitched alert of every individual contraction and pause, ever singular squeeze and give of a heart he’d heard, a heart he’d _felt_ as it died. 

It takes all that he is to make it silent, to ignore it, not to grasp for it and clutch it to him so close, so dear that it bleeds in through his flesh and never leaves, never stops again, not now, not ever: so much a part of him that he cannot breathe without its presence, without its pervasive hold.

“You texted that you had, but then that bastard got the drop on me,” John grins tight, strained, but just a bit rueful. “Felt the pinch before I saw him run, it was definitely calculated,” he concludes, casually, as if this were merely a case, only the work; as if clues made sense of _this_ , of all things—as if they ever could.

“Speaking of, I hear I owe you my gratitude, yet again,”John continues on, and Sherlock has to blink to follow him, swallows too often: all that force on his throat in order to be grounded here, in this room, in this unfathomable, blessed aftermath where John’s eyes are open and bright, and not before; not that endless march he’d resigned himself to, the nothing and the quiet and only the half where there used to be a whole.

“It was touch-and-go enough as it was,” and Sherlock doesn’t need to be reminded, he doesn’t, because it still shrieks in his veins, the terror and the way his whole self split and splintered as he watched John’s life bleed away, as his deadened heart refused to lift for Sherlock’s touch, failed to hearken to the desperate cries of a soul that needed it, that ached for it, that learned how to be in a whole new ways, in the first and only way because _that heart was beating_ and in beating, proved absolutely necessary.

Absolutely _necessary_.

Sherlock’s chest clenches at the memory, and he realises, it doesn’t have to seize much more to be too tight; he wonders if it will ever loosen entirely, if he’ll ever feel free again.

The evidence, while minimal, is fairly profound; it lends credence to the doubts that dance behind his eyes, in his blood—freedom from this is a rather more complicated matter, a question he cannot answer, a contradiction that steals his breath and beats his heart and breaks him, desperate, needing, and then— 

Rather more complicated, indeed.

“But there’s no chance they’d have started proper treatment in time, had you not figured out what was in that syringe.” Sherlock feels the tug, the skip-give of his atria in all the wrong patterns when he thinks of it, thinks of knowing he’d failed, that he wasn’t enough, that he hadn’t the strength to hold the heart, John’s heart: the one heart that held the world inside its fibres and fissures, the heart that bound itself to this realm, to Sherlock himself. He thinks of the after, just minutes prior, barely an hour past and gone and how that fear lingers, and he wonders perhaps if the drugs he’d prepared had entered his veins after all; if this is a fever dream as his heart goes the only way it can now, left on its own.

“You’re always brilliant,” John says with a more genuine, happier sort of grin; amazement and awe and pride and passion in the quirk of his lips, incredible, and yet sour in Sherlock’s stomach. “But fuck, Sherlock, that was damn near miraculous. How the hell’d you do it?”

He’s not sure he can answer that question. He knows the methods he employed, he knows the evidence he’d had, and he discovered what he needed from that evidence, he suspects—can’t remember clearly the hum and pump in every moment, too preoccupied was his mind, too heavy was the weight in his chest. and that’s the problem, really. He almost certainly had both the baseline and the incidental measurements he’d required to draw comparisons and formulate conjectures that would soon become conclusions. And yet, sentiment had overwhelmed him; he’d shook, his senses clouded by feeling; his ears were flooded with the rush of his own blood, his fingertips unsteady, sweat-slick. 

He knows that there is no logical explanation for how he managed to put together the clues and make sense of them, not as he was, not even as he is right now; it is beyond his comprehension, and that is terrifying.

Yet: if this image of John before him is in fact reality, then he’ll live his life alongside that terror, and gladly so. He’ll hold that terror as close as he can and never suffer its absence, its ephemeral demise; he will slot it in beneath his rib, line the bones with its cold and press John all the close to make it sufferable, to make it still and soften its sting, to put heat back into him and coax each spark toward the atrioventricular node, to make it seem worthwhile for the Purkinje fibers to retain automaticity, to keep him flailing when there’s no other light because John is there, John is coming, John is living and the world will spin immaculately for another precious day.

“Sherlock?” John’s voice brings him back and he looks up; avoids focusing too strongly on John, avoids taking him in and breathing his being close, because Sherlock’s lost his bearing, Sherlock was cast to the four winds and here is home, but Sherlock’s not sure where he drifted to, he isn’t sure how far he fell; he doesn’t know if the fog will ever lift, if he’ll find his course anew, if he even has the strength inside this moment to reach and to return.

“Come on,” John urges, ever mindful, ever watching Sherlock, making certain he is cared for, even now, even like this. “Sit.”

He sits. 

John, though, is suspicious; Sherlock reads it, obvious, in the lift of a brow as John peers at him, studies him, tries to draw out some sense.

“You weren’t hurt, were you?” John asks, his tone just this side of frantic, and Sherlock feels his whole body seize, his senses sharpen of their own volition when the beeping, the monitor begins to gain speed, urgency as John sits up straighter, struggles against the bruises, the cracked ribs where Sherlock had given everything he has, everything he is to the task of taking John’s heart and giving it life—knowing it was possible, because John had managed the feat; knowing it was necessary, because Sherlock couldn’t bear the alternative.

And _yet_ —

“Was he armed?” John presses, rakes eyes over Sherlock’s frame, clinical but dazed for the medication slipping through him to cut the pain. Sherlock shakes his head, brusquely, and John visibly relaxes, lets out a long, stuttering sigh, and for all that he tries to block out the noise, for all that he attempts to eschew the stimuli that bring him back to those moments where a life without John endured, impossible, beyond logic: for all that he tries, Sherlock can’t keep his own heart from syncing, from subconsciously, innately seeking that tempo and mirroring, mimicking, so overfilled with need.

“I’m fine, you know,” John tells him, reads him: a curve to his lips despite the shadow in his eyes and the bandages on his chest, the bruises Sherlock knows lie below, that peek out at the edges in the shape of Sherlock’s own palms, his fingertips pressing, pushing, pleading relentlessly with that muscle, those ventricles. John says it with an indulgent sort of affection that Sherlock cannot process, that his mind is too ravaged to grasp: singed to the core and numb, just ashes, the pathways rerouted, disconnected, languid and unwieldy: the bare essentials. Preparation for disconnection, deletion. 

Decommission.

Devastation.

Decay.

Sherlock’s throat is too dry, too tight to bear swallowing. 

“Of course you’re fine.” The words come out with a bite, a lethal, hateful sharpness that’s been mellowed, that’s rounded at the edges of late except that those parts of him are atrophied already, those pieces in his chest have fallen and seared in the acid, cracked on the surface, plummeted into his gut and disintegrated and he doesn’t remember them, can’t think, can’t know, it’s something automatic, autonomic, something sinister and base that coats his tongue and makes him violent, hurtful, keeps at bay the warmth that his heart knew, feared, relished in secret—so fleeting but so fucking dear, so desperately necessary that he built a self around it, just in case it stayed, just in case in thrived, the wonder of it, the splendour of it, the perfection in the simple press of it, the pulse, and the rhythm keeps trying to take hold but it can’t, he won’t let it, it’s too much, he’s lost all give and he’s a shell, too hard. He can’t move, can’t mimic, can’t take it into himself and learn to live inside its beat again, not now.

No.

“Yes,” John says, slow. Sceptical; not of the truth of the statement, not doubtful of what he affirms, but of Sherlock himself, of the mentality, the tone, the sneer. “Of course.”

“Yes,” Sherlock nods, dispassionate even as he feels that unrelenting tightness reclaiming his ribs, feels it start to press and crack and squeeze, even as he feels a sickness start to grow between his lungs.

“You’re fine,” he says, nods again, keeps nodding, and it’s a steady undulation, a listless  yet fervent bobbing of his head; it’s a predictable but it’s nothing, it’s transport, it’s less than transport: it is trivial.

But Ii keeps him lost in the ether, pushes him farther from the sound and the comfort, the contraction and the spark of life that stares him in the eye from a cold hospital bed, gaze tired, skin pallid, chest rising and falling and the neck, the neck at the side, along the throat, he can see—

_No_.

“You’re fine,” Sherlock repeats himself, voice hoarse, eyes stubborn, unable, unwilling to focus; lungs recalcitrant, shuddering, useless. “You’re fine,” and they’re the only words he knows, the only rhythm he can muster and it’s a poor excuse, it’s an insult to the beat and the give and the take and the sluice of blood and the sound and the way his whole being is made now to orient to that tempo, that energy, that light and that warmth and that brilliant, unfailing heart, and yet it failed. It failed; it grew cold, it turned rusty and turgid and grey and it gave up, gave out, it couldn’t stay or didn’t want to; Sherlock wasn’t strong enough to push and keep and hold and the song had ended and the world with it and where are they, now, how are they breathing and speaking and perhaps it’s all a vivid dream, and extended burst of postmortem neuronal firing where moments have stretched out to eternity and even that will never do, will never be enough and Sherlock feels the bile gnawing the base of his oesophagus, he feels it, he tastes it;

This cannot stand.

He cannot _be_ in the light of this, he cannot _exist_ inside of this, and yet there is nothing else but the loss, the threat of loss, the bitterness of hope restored but dangling, ready to fall once more. There is nothing but the way his heart trembles beyond his conscious ability to notice, the way he _knows_ it shakes and shivers and bleeds and _feels_ even if the barrier stands again, resurrected as everything sank to the depths and left him, fled from him when he was split wide, flayed open with the breeze teasing cruel at the cuts in him, the lacerations in the pericardium, gusting tendrils telling the heart of him that there was nothing, that he’d started to soften and break —the wall is shaky, ill-constructed, poorly made and yet it holds, walls him off, a schism in his psyche, the heart and brain divided once more and still there is a heart, now, there _is_ and its voice is strong, it sings because it knows no better, because it is a fool and his mind is wise, his mind is sure: his mind knows there is no surviving this loss again.

There is no surviving this loss in _truth_.

He clamps down on the voice, wrings at its throat until it cries out, shrieks and chokes and his handprints on John’s chest become etched in his own chest: on a more feeble heart, a fledgling heart, its limbs broken, snapped off only just as it learned how to crawl., as it dared to dream of flight.

“You’re fine,” Sherlock croaks out, his eyes wide and cool, wet but not weeping. “You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re—”

“Shhh,” John reaches, grabs Sherlock’s hands around the wrists and Sherlock can’t help it, can’t help the way his grip on that siren song beneath his sternum slips and that traitorous voice bursts forth with a gasp when John’s fingertips clench around the bones of him, bring to the fore the hum of his blood, frantic and fevered and fearful and full, dangerously swift, dizzying and Sherlock is on fire, the flames are licking and consuming, taunting and taking all at once, and John gathers Sherlock’s hands and draws them forward, brings them close to the bandaging, the bound swathing around his broken ribs and Sherlock aches, freezes, panics.

Recoils.

There’s uncertainty, and hurt in John’s eyes, and Sherlock is confused, conflicted, wrenched in two because that destroys him, the pain reflected: it hurts more than the agony that roils in his midsection and holds him captive, keeps him still. He slides his hands around, deftly reversing the hold so that his hands are on John, carefully avoiding the pulse-points too far up, too far down: clasped at the very centre of the forearm, safe, warm, almost too much but no rhythm, nothing to convince him, to whisper sweet that there’s nothing to fear, that it will never end, never die, that his heart is safe and his mind is bright, sharp within this fold, this perfect melee of feeling and pressure and force and infinite finitude because he knows, he _knows_ that isn’t true.

He is in love, and they are mere mortals. He is in love so deep that it transcends time and space and the laws of mathematics and Newtonian, no, even quantum physics. It extends to stars long dead but still glowing and outruns them, outlives them, and dies endless in the sky and all he can do is lose and his heart, it’s just too _weak_ , and his mind, for all that it can do, for all that it can unravel and solve, it, he, this—

His mind could never be a match for _this_.

Sherlock comes into himself, comes back to the moment and out of his mind with a blink, a long flutter of lashes to find he’s drawn John’s hands to his own chest, pressed them impossibly close and pulled John toward him; not good, John needs to rest except the twist, the darkness of his features isn’t for his own pain, the concern there is billowing outward and it hits Sherlock dead on, pierces the aorta and he has to fight to breathe, has to press John close because he can’t have the rhythm, he can’t, but the hope won’t _die_ and he’s weak, he’s so weak in this and he cannot stand, he cannot move, he needs John to hold it, to hold _him_ and that pounding, perilous heart he can’t kill for all that he tries, for all that every way he’s ever courted death or watched it play or known it to thrive rejects this single victim, his own beating flesh, he needs John. Just John. Only John.

Only _ever_ John.

“I’m fine,” John says, soft, low: soothing. “I’m going to be fine,” and his fingertips are stroking at Sherlock’s skin, begging the beat there to calm except it can’t, except the wall is tenuous and still it stays, keeps John’s touch from penetrating, from having the impact it should, from calling to Sherlock in all ways, from all sides and bringing him down from the edge and Sherlock can’t breathe, he can’t think, he can’t _breathe_.

He drops his head, loses control of his own muscles, his bones as he falls, as all but the heart and soul of him cave to the anguish, the terror, the way he died just hours before and yet still walked, still occupied space and bent motion around his person, pointless. He falls forward, all but the whole of him, into the man who holds his heart but cannot touch it; the man who moulds that heart even now, behind its gates.

Christ, but Sherlock cannot hold, cannot stand this barrage, this hateful, heartful, hurting mess of whatever predates affection, whatever transcends that insipid word that is tossed too lightly, too readily to fit all that he feels, here, all that he’s choking on, all that his heart tore itself apart to hold onto to when it fled, all that poisons and consumes him as he looks upon it, an illusion, a mirage, not to be trusted, all that he wants.

All that he needs.

“ _We’re_ going to be fine, love,” John murmurs, angled into the crown of Sherlock’s head, his still-shallow breaths rustling the limp curls and Sherlock fights a shiver; his mind refuses to measure respiration rates, deliberately rejects the opportunity to calculate a pulse from the data at hand, undeniable.

“I promise,” John’s lips tease against the hair follicles, and Sherlock wants the press of them, the heat, but no, no; he doesn’t want the push of blood through them, can’t allow that, can’t survive that, can’t have it just to lose it: not again. “We’re going to be fine.”

Sherlock wants to believe in that promise, but he can’t. He can’t trust it. 

He wants to, but he _can’t_.


End file.
